In late January, a spate of alarming
global-warming reports hit the newspapers. The International Climate Change
Taskforce warned that warming is likely to hit a “point of no return” within ten
years. The World Wildlife Fund also warned of imminent climate “tipping.”
Climateprediction.net announced that, by testing a wider variety of initial
conditions than other climate modelers, it had arrived at a more radical range
of warming predictions.

All of these studies employ the classic ruse
of advocacy statistics: they omit key explanatory variables, so that explanatory
power gets misattributed to those explanatory variables that are included. The
variable that these studies leave out is the solar-magnetic flux. As a result,
the warming caused by high levels of solar-wind over the last half-century gets
misattributed to greenhouse gases. This exaggerated greenhouse warming effect
then gets projected forward into trumped-up predictions of imminent catastrophe
if human production of greenhouse gases is not drastically curtailed.

Sunspots and climate

Correlation between sunspot activity and
cloudless skies has been observed for over a century. It is also known that the
Little Ice Age coincided with a sunspot minimum. What has been a mystery until
recently is the mechanisms by which solar activity might affect climate. In the
last decade, scientists have finally begun to solve this riddle. Solar flares
generate storms of solar-magnetic flux that partially shield the Earth from
cosmic radiation. Evidence suggests that this cosmic radiation promotes cloud
formation, either by ionizing the atmosphere, or by affecting the atmosphere’s
electrical circuit. Thus high levels of solar wind have the effect of blowing
away the cloud cover, giving the Earth a sunburn. Add that solar activity has
been very high since the 1940's, and the slight global warming observed since
the mid 70's could easily be due to this effect.

None of the global warming alarmists take
this effect into account. All of the recent alarmist studies are based on the
GCMs (General Circulation Models) employed by the IPCC (the International Panel
on Climate Change). These IPCC GCMs have never included the effects of cosmic
rays on cloud formation. Back in 1996, at the time of the IPCC’s Second
Assessment Report, this omission was marginally tenable. Sunspots generate a
slight increase in solar luminosity (the relatively cool spots are surrounded by
super-hot “faculae”) but this increase in radiance is not enough to create
significant global warming. The correlation between sunspots and cloudiness was
also known, but since no one had any idea what the causal link might be, they
did not built it into their models.

The situation had changed drastically by
2001, when the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report came out. By then the cosmic ray
theory had been formulated and evidenced and could be modeled. There were still
some difficulties with the theory. In particular, direct measurement of the
effect of cosmic rays on cloudiness was complicated by volcanic activity and
other influences on cloud formation, but evidence of the long term correlation
between cosmic radiation and climate was piling up impressively. In sum, the
mechanism was strongly evidenced, but the available correlations were to the
output of the climate models (global climate), not to the inputs that drive the
models (the amount of solar energy getting reflected back into space by cloud
cover).

The scientific thing to do in this
circumstance is go with the best available estimate of the relation between
solar-flux and the Earth’s reflectivity, then vary the parameters of the
relation looking the model specification that best fits the historical
temperature data. Instead, the IPCC just continued to omit solar-magnetic
effects, calling them “unproven” (6.11.2.2). This from a climate-prediction
enterprise that is nothing but speculation from top to bottom. The entire
enterprise is driven by best estimates, but here a strongly evidenced key
determinant of global climate was left out entirely. No mention was even made of
how failing to account for solar-magnetic warming effects causes any such
effects to be misattributed to greenhouse warming.

Environmental religion

The fact is, global warming alarmists are
not scientists, they are propagandists. Instead of trying to incorporate
solar-magnetic effects into their models, the alarmists regard the
solar-magnetic theory of warming as a competitor to their preferred greenhouse
gas theory. As evidence for the impact of cosmic radiation on clouds continues
to roll in, the alarmists are still concocting excuses to ignore this mechanism
that undercuts their preferred conclusions.

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt recently
justified leaving cosmic radiation out of NASA models on the grounds that the
effect is not needed. “[T]here is no obvious need for ‘new’ or unknown physics
to explain what [is] going on,” he explains to science fiction writer Jerry
Pournelle (at Pournelle’s website). Earth to NASA: it isn’t enough to tweak your
model to fit the historical temperature record. You have to fit ALL the data,
including the evidence that cosmic radiation produces cloud cover. If you leave
out a real effect, your model is WRONG. Warming that ought to be attributed to
solar activity gets misattributed to greenhouse gases, and whatever predictions
you make on the basis of those exaggerated warming effects are lies.

These lies are intentional. The goal is to
have a grounds for demanding the curtailment of human activity. That is the
founding stone of environmental religion. Environmentalists see man as
displacing nature, and in this contest, they side with nature. As the
self-appointed representatives of a natural world that cannot speak for itself,
they see all human impacts as by definition bad, and the interdiction of human
impacts as necessarily good, regardless of whether the pretext for curtailing
human activity is honest or dishonest.

Gavin Schmidt’s rejection of proper
scientific principles is just one example. In the sixties and early seventies,
when global temperatures seemed to be falling, Stanford climatologist Stephen
Schneider claimed that fossil fuel burning was causing global cooling and needed
to be curtailed. When temperatures started rising, he switched to claiming that
that fossil fuel burning is causing global warming, and needs to be curtailed.
If sunspot activity falls off and cooling returns, he will presumably again
claim that human activity is causing cooling, and needs to be curtailed.
Schneider seems to be starting with his preferred conclusion (human impact bad),
then picking and choosing from the available reason and evidence to fashion the
best case he can for this conclusion.

This kind of behavior is why we see today a
continued refusal by the global warming alarmists to incorporate well documented
solar-magnetic effects into their models. If the implications of honest science
do not condemn human impact, these opponents of human impact will find excuses
to reject honest science.

Rational environmentalism

Those who study the cyclical patterns in
sunspot activity predict a solar minimum by 2030. There is lots of evidence that
if such a minimum does occur, increased cloud cover will block the sun and cool
the Earth. In this case, the slightly warmer jacket of greenhouse gases created
by fossil fuel burning will turn out to be a good thing, not a bad thing. More
generally, until we can predict the course of natural variation, we have no idea
whether a particular human impact will turn out to be good or bad.

There are valid reasons to limit fossil fuel
consumption, but they have nothing to do with global warming. One is to limit
pollution. Another is to conserve limited resources. Most important is strategic
national interest. Our economy is terribly vulnerable to any kink in the oil
supply pipeline. This vulnerability can be reduced by taking four steps. A hefty
tax on fossil fuels (with all proceeds returned to taxpayers in the form of
lower other taxes) would reduce demand, driving the world price of oil down to
the cost of producing the easiest to produce oil. This would create a net gain
for our economy while at the same time taking the stress off of production and
distribution facilities. We should also fill the strategic oil reserve and we
should drill and cap enough domestic reserves to be able to make up any
temporary shortfall in imports. Lastly, we should switch over to nuclear
generation.

Any decade now, breakthroughs in solar
electric generation and in battery technology are likely to place much of our
energy production and distribution beyond the reach of any kink in oil supplies.
Until then, reducing our vulnerability to supply kinks will require substantial
reductions in fossil fuel consumption. It is possible that the associated
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will send us into an ice-age that higher
levels of emissions would forestall, but we don’t yet understand climate science
well enough to proceed sensibly on this kind of concern. That would be as nutty
as paying a high price today in order to gamble that we will want to be wearing
a slightly lighter jacket of greenhouse gases fifty or a hundred or two hundred
years from now, when we have no idea where natural temperature variation is
headed.

At some point, climate science may have
clear prescriptions to offer, but not today. The best we can do now is to strive
for rapid economic, scientific and technological advance, in order to best be
able to deal with whatever threats await.

This article was published in The
Stanford Review, 2/15/2005. Similar ground, but with links to the referenced
information, is covered in
THIS post at Alec's Error Theory
blog.